Times Online to combine with Sky News

Murdoch making family members play together

Sky is partnering with the Times Online to create tailored news video that features the best of the two news sources.

Sky News already supplies its video feeds to the Times Online site, but the new partnership means The Times and Sunday Times analysts will provide commentary with Sky News footage.

Sky, The Times and The Sunday Times are all owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media group, so the relationship between the two makes sense.

"These are early days, but we anticipate a strong potential for expansion of this partnership between Sky News and The Times in future," says John Ryley, head of Sky News, according to StrategyEye.

Repaying debt

BSkyB is currently trying to raise £400m to repay its debts, while at the same time it is attempting to buy broadband firm Tiscali in order to further its presence in the broadband provision market, which it hopes to boost from the current 1.8m customers in the UK.

The tie in with The Times and The Sunday Times would allow Sky to add greater value to its considerable on line presence.

"We have more than 20m unique monthly users and in the time that we have been developing our partnership with Sky the number of people watching video on our site has trebled," says James Harding, editor of The Times.